


In France, One Egg is Un Oeuf

by SomewhereApart



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Breakfast Food, Gen, Missing Year (Once Upon a Time), glowery queens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 12:04:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13457880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomewhereApart/pseuds/SomewhereApart
Summary: On the second day of the Missing Year, we find Regina, Robin, Little John and Snow White in line together at the breakfast buffet. Will Regina have to eat her earlier words along with her cinnamon rolls?





	In France, One Egg is Un Oeuf

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a prompt: enchanted forest missing year second day at breakfast. Little John and Regina at the breakfast buffet. At one point snow pinches Regina for something she says

The first night back in the queen’s castle had been mostly about finding sleeping arrangements – it had been a late hour when their ragtag party had arrived ready to take back the castle, only to discover it had been willingly handed back to them. There’d been dinner of sorts at the camp while they’d awaited the lowering of the shield, and so on that first night nobody sought sustenance but the Queen herself, and Robin. 

When morning came, Little John rolled himself out of the uncomfortably soft bed he’d spent the night in, coughed a bit to clear his throat of dust (the whole castle was a bit dusty, but these rarely used rooms in the East Wing where the Merry Men were temporarily housed hadn’t seen use since years before the curse, and had managed to collect a particularly thick layer). He dressed and grabbed his quiver – while Robin and the Queen had disappeared to scrounge up their own dinner, it had been decided that the Men would go out in the morning to hunt up something to feed the castle denizens.

He meets Robin in the hallway, bow-less, and his friend and leader smirks and assures him, “You can leave your bow behind, Little John. You won’t be needing it.”

“We’re to go out and hunt for breakfast,” John informs him, thinking surely someone else had told him this the evening prior. “It will be quite a late morning meal with the sun already up, and I can’t imagine the  _Queen_ likes to be kept waiting.” She grumbles, “She’ll probably turn us all into toads or worse.”

Robin shakes his head, and chuckles, assuring the man, “I very much doubt that. And besides, there’s no need for a hunt. Breakfast is already being prepared, I’m sure.”

Little John frowns, asks how that can be so, and Robin claps a hand on his back and leads him toward the massive common chamber where they are to take their meals, telling him, “Let’s just say the Queen never expected to return here with a full staff of help and the support of her people.”

They’d been prepared to go hungry for a while, or nearly so. Had been prepared for their usual hard work of hunting up pheasants, digging up nutritious roots, boiling the less flavorful vegetation into soups and stews with tough chimera meat. What the denizens of the Queen’s castle hadn’t been prepared for was an entire store room stocked full with meats, and cheese, fruits and soft pastries, eggs and dense, brown bread – all magically preserved by the Queen’s own hand before she’d cast her curse. All there waiting for her return, should she need to feed and fend for herself.

When John walks into the hall, the aroma that greets him has his mouth watering and his stomach growling. Along one wall, there is a veritable buffet of breakfast foods. Flapjacks and griddled bread, with pitchers of syrup and bricks of butter, sausages and bacon, eggs smothered with cheese, eggs mixed with peppers and onion, eggs by themselves.  Baskets of biscuits, trays of nut-covered sticky buns, and a neatly stacked mountain of sweet cakes being unceremoniously torn down by those who move along the table and pile their plates. At the end there are pitchers of juice and boiled water for tea.

Little John hasn’t seen a spread like this in years - since before the curse, since he lived a very different life. He turns to Robin with a bewildered grin, and together the men head for the tables. It’s just their luck that they happen to join the line right behind the Princess and the Queen herself. The Queen is complaining, was loathe to share her spoils – or at least this much of them – with those in the castle, but the Princess dismisses her mildly. 

“Regina, it’s good for morale,” Snow White insists, gesturing around them before grabbing a plate (ornate, fine china. The sort of thing the Merry Men used to pilfer and sell off to help those who would never dream of affording such finery). “Look how happy everyone is.”

“Yes, well,” the Queen bites. “Let’s just hope they’re still happy when they find out they’ve eaten all their food on the first day.” She cranes her head back then, her dark eyes landing dead on Little John. “Do keep in mind that if you clear the whole buffet, you’ll starve for supper and so will we all.”

The Princess frowns and reaches over, giving the Queen’s arm a light pinch of admonishment (Little John can’t believe she’d dare – the young princess who spent so much time running from this very same woman who wanted her dead and buried), and insisting there’s plenty of food.

The Queen has frozen, livid, gripping her plate until her knuckles whiten, eyes wide, teeth clenched.

It’s Robin who breaks the tension, or tries to anyway, saying affably, “Don’t worry, milady. I’ll make sure my Men don’t eat you out of hearth and home.”

“It’s Your Majesty,” the Queen growls, but she takes a step forward and reaches to serve herself a slice of griddled bread. As loathe as he is to agree with the woman on anything, John imagines that her preserved cabinets must not be limitless, and food really is scarce, so while he fills his plate he tries not to be greedy.

It does not escape his notice, though, that in front of him the Queen piles her plate to excess - the griddled bread with butter and syrup, four pieces of bacon and two sausages, cheesy eggs and peppered, too, a biscuit, two sticky buns, three sweet cakes. She’s balancing the whole thing precariously on one hand, the other clutching a goblet filled with apple cider, and as he watches her make her way to a table with the Princess, as he hopes just a little bit that she will trip and it will all go flying, Little John thinks to himself that it looks like  _he_   is not the one who struggles with restraint at the breakfast buffet.


End file.
